SKJ Today

Founding Amateurs?…18th Century American Trust and Mistrust of Government

May 3, 2010 // No Comments »

A fundamental suspicion of government and its tireless capacity for overreaching is part of the American DNA. That’s a fact that is relatively indisputable. But the 18th century roots of this attitude are more nuanced than we might think, or so says Gordon Wood in a really nice op-ed piece in the NY Times today. Wood begins by noting that less than a third of voters polled are not interested in voting for their current incumbents. One Illinois woman typifies this attitude in a response to a Washington Post reporter:

“I am not really happy right now with anybody,� a woman from Decatur, Ill., recently told a Washington Post reporter. As she considered the prospect of a government composed of fledgling lawmakers, she noted: “When the country was founded, those guys were all pretty new at it. How bad could it be?�

Wood goes on to address her question:

Actually, our founders were not all that new at it: the men who led the revolution against the British crown and created our political institutions were very used to governing themselves. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams and John Adams were all members of their respective Colonial legislatures several years before the Declaration of Independence. In fact, these Revolutionaries drew upon a tradition of self-government that went back a century or more. Virginians ran their county courts and elected representatives to their House of Burgesses. The people of Massachusetts gathered in town meetings and selected members of the General Court, their Colonial legislature…If one wanted to explain why the French Revolution spiraled out of control into violence and dictatorship and the American Revolution did not, there is no better answer than the fact that the Americans were used to governing themselves and the French were not. In 18th-century France no one voted; their Estates-General had not even met since 1614. The American Revolution occurred when it did because the British government in the 1760s and 1770s suddenly tried to interfere with this long tradition of American self-government.

Wood describes how the surging populism of the period of the Articles of Confederation was tempered during the the late 1780’s:

Although federal term limits have been confined to the presidency, the fear of entrenched and far-removed political power, as the present anti-incumbency mood suggests, remains very much part of American popular culture. Yet precisely because we are such a rambunctious and democratic people, as the framers of 1787 appreciated, we have learned that a government made up of rotating amateurs cannot maintain the steadiness and continuity that our expansive Republic requires.

Posted in History, Politics, Uncategorized

Why is the Resurrection Significant?

April 1, 2010 // No Comments »

At our church’s weekly bible study we were discussing the significance of the Resurrection. It was a great conversation. I wish I had re-read a piece by Richard Gaffin beforehand. Here’s a nice passage from his essay entitled “Redemption and Resurrection”. Particularly nice is Gaffin’s emphasis that Christ didn’t rise but was raised from the dead:

In view, further, is Christ’s resurrection as an innately eschatological event. In fact, as much as any, it is the key inaugurating event of eschatology, the dawn of the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15), the arrival of the age to come (Rom. 12:2; Gal. 1:4). It is not an isolated event in the past, but, in having occurred in the past, it belongs to the future consummation and from that future has entered history. In Christ’s resurrection the resurrection-harvest at the end of history is already visible. Pressed, if present, say, at a modern-day prophecy conference, as to when the event of bodily resurrection for believers will take place, the first thing the apostle would probably want to say is, it has already begun!

The emphasis on Christ as the first-fruits of resurrection points out that, for Paul, the primary significance of Christ’s resurrection lies in what he and believers have in common, not in the profound difference between them; the accent falls not on his true deity but on his genuine humanity. The Resurrection, as we will presently note in more detail, is not so much an especially evident display or powerful proof of Christ’s divine nature as it is the powerful transformation of his human nature.

This emphasis is confirmed in an implicit but pervasive fashion by Paul’s numerous references, without elaboration, to the simple fact of the Resurrection [4]. These undeveloped statements display a consistent, unmistakable pattern: 1) God in his specific identity as the Father raises Jesus from the dead (Gal. 1:1, 2) Jesus is passive in his resurrection. This viewpoint is held without exception, so far as I can see. Nowhere does Paul teach that Christ was active in or contributed to his resurrection, much less that he raised himself; Jesus did not rise, but was raised from the dead. The stress everywhere is on the creative power and action of the Father, of which Christ is the recipient.

Posted in Christology, Eschatology, Uncategorized, theology

It’s Gold Baby…

December 17, 2009 // No Comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

How Do We Know Anything?

October 23, 2009 // No Comments »

I’m re-reading T.S. Eliot’s doctoral dissertation which was on F.H. Bradley’s understanding of knowledge and experience. It’s incredibly elegant and profound prose.

When we use terms like “experience” and “feeling” we need to be careful suggests Eliot. Eliot here is explicating what the terms mean to Bradley, but he’s certainly a sympathetic interpreter. He thinks it’s important to resist the temptation to identify experience with consciousness, or to make experience and adjective that modifies a subject. Nor should experience be confused with immediate sensation, like “a panorama passing before a reviewer.” Likewise it’s not the content or substance of a mind.

Feeling is just as complicated to nail down. It’s not the feeling describe by psychologists, though it is related to what they describe and “continuous with psychological feeling”. Eliot thinks it’s important to note that while Bradley describes feeling as “the immediate unity of a finite psychological centre”, it’s not merely the feeling of a mind or consciousness. For Bradley feeling is the “the general condition before distinctions and relations have been developed, and where as yet neither any subject nor any object exists.” Feeling is anything that is “only present and simply is”. This means that everything actual must be felt, but that we only call something “feeling” in so far as we take it “as failing to be more.”

Experience then for Bradley, in contrast to most of his philosophical contemporaries, is not at “any stage of consciousness merely a presentation which can be isolated from other elements also present or subsequent in consciousness.” It isn’t “sense-data” or “sensations”, nor is it a stream of feeling that “as merely felt, is an attribute of the subject side only and must in some way be “related” to an external world. It’s also not more purely or immediately felt in the animal or infant mind than in the mind of an adult engaged in critical inquiry. Bradley is doubtful that there is such a thing as “immediate experience”. Eliot thinks Bradley understates matters, claiming that there certainly is no immediate experience at all.

If we’re going to develop a theory of knowledge, we have to postulate some given upon which knowledge is built. We’re then forced to take this construction as something which develops in time. We think of things presented to our notice at any or all given moments, and “of the whole situation in knowing as a complex with this datum as one of the constituents.” We also tend to consider the development of consciousness “in biological evolution as a development of knowledge”. If there is indeed a “problem” of knowledge so to speak then neither of these perspectives is irrelevant. But there’s a tendency to confuse the two and herein lies the issue. From the genetic point of view, all of the so called “stages” are actualities, “whereas the various steps of knowing in the mind of an adult…are abstractions, not known as separate objects of attention.” They all exist for us simultaneously without priority. In any stage of human development we don’t find feeling without thought, or presentation without reflection. Even at primitive levels of consciousness we find what we call feeling and thought, presentation, redintegration and abstraction, all at a lower stage. This calls into question the study of primitive consciousness because we find in our own knowing all the same constituents, if only in a clearer and thus more readily apprehensible form.

All that being said, if all the same constituents were present to us in every instance of knowing, “if none were omitted in error, or if none had any temporal precedence over another, all analyses of knowing would be equally tenable.” There wouldn’t be any real difference. Where there are no bones “anybody can carve a goose.” If we didn’t think that at some points in time our consciousness is nearer to “pure experience” than at others, if we didn’t at some points think of “sense-datum” as prior to “object”, or feel that “act” or “content”, or “immanent” and “transcendent” object were not in some sense independent from one another, and capable of “entering into different contexts as table and chair, the fact of their difference would be a perfect example of useless knowledge.” In Bradley Eliot finds this difficulty in an “aggravated form”, but not one that is more fatal than in any of his contemporaries.

We talk about immediate experience and contrast it with ideal construction. This immediate experience  is prior in time to ideal construction. But no actual experience can be merely immediate, for if it were “we should certainly know nothing about it.” We also can’t clearly draw the line between the experienced, the given and the constructed. Difference only “holds good” in a relative and fluctuating perspective. “Experience alone is real, but everything can be experienced.” There is no absolute point of view where real and ideal can be ultimately distinguished and labeled. “All of our terms turn out to be unreal abstractions; but we can defend them, and give them a kind of reality and validity (the only validity which they can posses or can need) by showing that they express the theory of knowledge which is implicit in all our practical activity.”

Although we really aren’t acquainted with any element of experience that we can truly identify as immediate, nor can we know immediate experience directly as an object, “we can yet arrive at it by inference, and even conclude that it is the starting point of our knowing, since it is only in immediate experience that knowledge and its object are one.” The fact that we can make this reifying move and to some extent make our immediate experience an abstract inferred object, but not an object “among others”, nor a term which “can be in relation to anything else” is an embarrassing problem. We’re forced to further abstraction, handling this “object” as if it were an adjective of either a subject or an object, as our experience or as the experienced world. But whether we choose to say “the world is my experience” or that experience is constituted by “that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness, brownness, heaviness, or what not, we have been in either case guilty of importing meanings which hold good only within experience.” We can only discuss experience from various sides in an effort to correct the descriptions from other sides which are always partial and abstracted.

Posted in Philosophy, Uncategorized

To Fear or Not to Fear

July 30, 2009 // No Comments »

“In his explanation of the commandments, Luther begins every one with these words, ‘We should fear and love God…It is perhaps well known that there are some Christians today who maintain that Luther made a mistake in this. They strike out the ‘fear’ and say that we should love God, nothing more…But when people of our superficial generation have read the the Bible as thoroughly as Luther did, they will see that Luther was right also in this…He has seen that love to God does not exclude fear, but that they mutually strengthen each other…The greater the good in life, the more dangerous it becomes to us, if we misuse it. And since the grace of God is life’s most precious good, grace is more dangerous than anything else int he world, if we misuse it.”-Ole Hallesby, Under His Wings

How does one make sense of a passage like this in light of the most preponderant commandment in Scripture: “Be not afraid”? What about John’s insistence that “perfect love drives out fear”. (1 Jn 4:18)?

There is certainly a sort of fear that is inappropriate for the baptized. Such fear is more likely the product of an unsanctified imagination than a pious heart. Perhaps it’s the sort of fear rooted in the suspicion that when confronted with God, we will meet someone or something much like ourselves. One who reckons, forgives, judges much the same way we do. This is indeed a fearful prospect, but in the end it probably tells us more about ourselves than about God (which as Calvin reminds us isn’t a bad thing, as true knowledge of self will ultimately, by God’s grace, lead us into knowledge of God).

The fear Luther finds appropriate, which the Scriptures tell us is the beginning of wisdom, must be rooted in something much more like the Psalmist speaks of in Psalm 147:

“He declares his word to Jacob, his statutes and and his judgments to Israel.
“He has not done so to any other nation; to them he has not revealed his judgments.
Hallelujah!”

It is only when one comes into the embrace of grace that one even glimpses the nature of divine judgment and justice. Von Balthasar gets at something like this in Love Alone Is Credible:

“…the moment we see our sins objectified before us on the Cross, it becomes all the more impossible to leave the One who died for us to his fate; so loveless a thought reveals our whole evil heart to us, love awakens fear in us, and the terrifying reality of being left behind by God (which is timeless as far as the one abandoned is concerned) shows us vividly that hell is no pedagogical threat, it is no mere ‘possibility’. Instead, it is the reality that the God-forsaken one experienced in an eminent way because no one can even approximately experience the abandonment by God as horribly as the Son, who shares the same essence with the Father for all eternity…We are therefore not required to bring a systematically conceived hell into harmony with the love of God and make it credible, or indeed justify it conceptually as love (and not perhaps merely as the revelation of self-glorifying divine justice), because no such system could be constructed out of a possible ‘knowledge’ apart from or beyond love and at the same time related to it. We are required only not to let go of love, the love that believes and hopes through both is suspended in the air so that its Christian wings may grow. Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss below, which is only part of my own flight. Similarly, I can speak of hell only in relation to myself, precisely because I can never imagine the possible damnation of another as more likely than my own.”

There is perhaps no more painful fear than that of wounding or betraying one’s beloved. And yet this fear is not possible without first pledging, with one’s whole self, one’s love. Before that, it is abstract, a possibility, one that cannot produce the sort of fear that is rooted in love. Perhaps perfect love drives out imperfect fear, replacing it with a fear that flows from faith, rather than inhibiting it.

Posted in Bible, Spirituality, Uncategorized

This Is ABSOLUTELY Hilarious! Must watch!

June 14, 2009 // 1 Comment »

Posted in Uncategorized, Video

What Is Systematic Theology?

June 13, 2009 // 2 Comments »

People not familiar with the term or discipline often ask me what systematic theology is. Now, after reading an essay in Colin Gunton’s Theology Through The Theologians, I feel as though I might actually have an intelligble response. Gunton’s great summary statement reads as follows:

Simply, we can say that systematic theology is the articulation of truth claims of Christianity, with an eye to internal consistency, on the hand; and, on the other, to their coherence with Scripture, the Christian tradition, and other truth- philosophical, scientific, moral and artistic.

Gunton claims that it is possible to profess Christian doctrine as a discipline, and yet not be concerned with being a systematic theologian. Christian doctrine could be taught as an authoritative given as a physicist might handle the theory of relativity. Or one could treat Christian doctrine as a historical fact from a previous era. But neither of these will do because of the post-Christian nature of our culture, or at least the post Christian sensibilities of our culture’s prevailing intellectual presuppositions. Our modern western context requires  “some account, certainly from the university theologian, but also from the Church, of the intellectual credentials of what they profess.”

But the need for a systematic account of the faith doesn’t just arise from exterior cultural pressure. There is an internal demand as well. The Gospel claims to make universal truth claims about God, the world and the nature of human being. “It therefore requires that attention be given to its systematic structure, that is to the interrelation of the various levels and dimensions of its truth.”

Gunton points to Anselm as an example for systematicians to emulate. First because engages the sceptic who finds the claims the Gospel makes intellectually dubious. Second, particularly important Gunton thinks in his own English context, is Anselm’s willingness to adopt a conversational approach to the relationship between theology and philosophy, as opposed to seeing them as related in a parallel fashion or compartmentalizing them, in effect separating them. In Anselm, theology and philosophy are integrated into a “unified approach to theological truth.” This results in an essay on the nature of the atonement, generally conceived of  in contemporary theology as something “strictly doctrinal”, bearing a striking resemblance in form to Anslem’s discussion of the proof for God’s existence, which today is treated in philosophy of religion.

Another important insight Gunton gleans from Anselm is that theology can be systematic without aiming at creating a grandiose system. Anselm treats the topics of theology “in relative independence of of one another.” That is, one can think carefully and systematically about about baptism, the atonement, the existence of God, or the nature of the future life without trying to connect them all by means of a unifiying principle which would rationally illuminate them all, as in Spinoza’s geometrically ordered philosophy. Anselm, like Irenaeus before him, and like all great theologians, doesn’t feel the need to say everything every time. But he does keep in mind the implications of what he is saying on one occassion for future statements on other occassions.

Posted in Uncategorized

One Body, Many Parts…

June 12, 2009 // No Comments »

Spent the better part of the evening catchin up with a dear friend. Like most good conversations, the quality of the questions outpaced the clarity of our answers. But we concluded that this much is true:

1. Jesus is bigger and more complex than we are. Which we figured out means we don’t know really what we’re doing.

2. Jesus likes fueling our passions, even if and when they’re off kilter, and we trust he knows where, when and if we’re humble, discerning and attentive, he’ll re-center them.

3. We both feel free. Well more appropriateley freed. Not by ourselves, but by our Lord, Jesus Christ. It’s nice, and daunting. Because the stakes are lower, and higher. The blessings of Christ-centred complexity! Thanks be to God.

Posted in Uncategorized

Beastmaster

June 11, 2009 // No Comments »

I was reading Peter Leithart’s commentary on 1 & 2 Samuel, A Son To Me, and came across this passage:

When he heard Goliath’s blasphemy, David inquired about rewards and spoke boldly against Goliath’s defiance of Israel, and word of the brash young man got back to Saul. David told Saul that he was prepared to face the Philistine because he had already fought and defeated a bear and a lion (17:37). To David’s mind, when Goliath started defying God, he almost ceased to be human and became no more than a bear or lion. And David was confident that the Lord would deliver him from Goliath’s “hand” as He had delivered him from the “hand” of beasts. David was the new Adam that Israel had been waiting for, the beast-master taking dominion over bears and lions and now fighting a “serpent”.

Leithart likens Goliath to a serpent because of the particular attention to the scales of his armor. Here Israel’s deliverer vanquishes the serpent that oppresses God’s people in the wilderness for forty days.

Reading this made me realize how significant food laws and animal symbolism are in Scripture, and how we ignore them at our own peril. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglass argues that the profound symbolism in the food laws that separated animals into clean and unclean would not be lost on the average ancient Israelite. The distinction between clean and unclean animals corresponds to the distinction between Israel, God’s set apart people, and the nations (who are throughout Scripture referred to symbolically as “wild beasts”). Amidst the clean animals there were only some that could be offered up sacrificially in worship, as there were only a select group that could offer such sacrifices on the people’s behalf. Douglass provides a host of other examples. The parallels are numerous and striking. Every meal offered an occasion for reflection on Israel’s election and vocation as a people.

It’s interesting that in Mark 1:13 we are told that Jesus is in the wilderness being tempted by Satan for forty days, with the wild beasts and the angels who are serving him. Like Adam Jesus is with the beasts and faces the serpent, but he does not succumb to temptation, and the angels are not called into to service to block his entrance into the Garden but to serve him as he procures the way for his people to enter the Holy City. As Prophet he quotes Moses to his adversary that he might not be distracted from his work as Priest, which would erase the distinction between the sheep of his flock and the beasts that would threaten to devour him, taking his place as the rightful King of all people, Jew and Gentile, all cleansed by the blood of the Lamb.

Posted in Uncategorized

BUT NOW…Reflections on The Meaning of Christ’s Death.

April 10, 2009 // No Comments »

But now the righteousness of Godhas been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ  for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for fall have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Romans 3:21-25)

The righteousness of God is revealed through the faithfulness of Jesus. What is the righteousness of God? Is Paul referring to God’s moral perfection? While the phrase means nothing less than this, it certainly means much more. Paul is referring to God’s fidelity, God’s trustworthiness, God’s ability to mean what he says and do what he promises. God’s creative intentions have not come to fruition and God’s special people Israel have been dragged into the mud and mire of the sin along with the rest of the nations. It seems as if evil will have the last word. As things have been so they shall be. BUT NOW…God’s faithfulness has been revealed. Where? How? Through the faithfulness of Jesus. Jesus said no in the wilderness to everything Adam and Eve said yes to in the Garden (Mt 4:1-11; Lk 4:1-13). In the wilderness where Israel chose disobedience and death, he choose life (Dt 30:19). Through Jesus, the second Adam healing and holiness would came (Rom 5:12-21), and not just to Israel, but to the whole world (Ep 3:1-6), indeed to the whole cosmos (Col 1:20, Rev 21:5).

The righteousness of God, God’s covenant faithfulness and unswerving love are revealed in the faithfulness of Jesus. Jesus is the climax of the covenant (10:4).  In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus we see God refusing our refusal. In Jesus we hear God’s Yes to us, a Yes that will always be greater than our No, even at great cost to God.

In and as Jesus Christ God steps forth as our prophet, priest and king. Through Christ our prophet in and through the Spirit we are delivered from ignorance to knowledge, from darkness to light, from duty to choice (Jn 1:9; Jn 1:17-18; 1 Cor 2:13; Gal 5:1; Ep 5:8 Rom 8:4). The Father sends the Son, empowered by the Spirit,  to be our Priest, who as priest and victim makes the sacrifice that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Is 53:3-5; Is 53:11; Mt 26:28; Mk 14:24; Lk 22:20; Jn 1:29; Rom 5:9; Rom 8:3; 2 Cor 5:19-21; Gal 4:4-5; Eph 2:13; Col 1:20; Heb 9:7, 12-14, 18-25; Heb 10:4, 19; Heb 11:28; Heb 12:24; Heb 13:11-12, 20;  1 Pet 1:2, 19; 1 Pet 3:18; Heb 7:26-27; 1 Jn 1:7; Rev 1:5; Rev 5:9; Rev 7:4; Rev 19:13). Christ our Shepherd King brings us back from our wanderings, delivers us from bondage, and gives us the Spirit to make us new and fit us for citizenship in his Father’s Kingdom. (Mt 6:10; Mt 12:28; Mt 13:34; Mt 25:34; Mk 9:1; Mk 14:25; Lk 11:2, 17-20; Lk 13:29; Lk 15; Lk 22:29; Jn 20:22; Ac 1:8; 1 Cor 15:24, 45; Eph 2:2;  2 Pet 1:11; 1 Thess 2:12; 2 Tim 4:18; Heb 2:14; Heb 12:28; Rev 1:6; Rev 5:10; Rev 12:10).

There are aspects of the story of Jesus that are scandalous to the modern mind, not the least of which is Christ’s substitutionary, vicarious death for sinners. We can perhaps take comfort in knowing that the message of the cross was no less scandalous in the first century than it is in ours. “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Cor 1:18) N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, is worth quoting at some length here:

the propitiatory effect of Jesus’ death…[when] seen as the result of God’s overarching and overwhelming mercy and love, and in which the persons of the Trinity are held in extremely close union, is not subject to the critique he has leveled against what increasingly looks like a bizarre (if sadly still well known) caricature… The sense which penal substitution makes it does not make, in the last analysis, within the narrative of feudal systems of honour and shame. It certainly does not make the sense it makes within the world of some arbitrary lawcourt. It makes the sense it makes within the biblical world, the Old Testament world, within which the creator God, faced with a world in rebellion, chose Israel – Abraham and his family – as the means of putting everything right, and, when Israel itself had rebelled, promised to set that right as well and so to complete the purpose of putting humans right and thus setting the whole created order back the right way up. And the long-promised way by which this purpose would be achieved was, as hints and guesses in the Psalms and prophets indicate, that Israel’s representative, the anointed king, would be the one through whom this would be accomplished. Like David facing Goliath, he would stand alone to do for his people what they could not do for themselves. It is because Jesus, as Israel’s representative Messiah, was therefore the representative of the whole human race, that he could appropriately become its substitute. That is how Paul’s logic works. ‘One died for all, therefore all died,’ he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5.14; and thus, seven verses later, ‘God made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin,’ he concluded seven verses later, ’so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (5.21). And it is within that argument that we find the still deeper truth, which is again rooted in the dark hints and guesses of the Old Testament: that the Messiah through whom all this would be accomplished would be the very embodiment of YHWH himself. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself’ (2 Cor 5.19).

“God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21). Christ became like us that we might become like him, that we might look, and live and love like him. In Christ God became our vicarious substitute.  God became sin and judged sin that we might be freed from its destructive grasp. Free from sin and free for God, we the called community of atonement are to be the righteousness of God in and for the world God loves. We are to be the sign, foretaste and instrument of the Father’s kingdom through the power of the Spirit that reminds the world that God has not given up on it, that Christ will return to right every wrong and wipe every tear, to truly make all things new. Bearing witness to this glorious hope with our lips and our lives is our commission, calling and privilege. Thanks be to God.

Posted in Uncategorized